There was a moment--a telling image--during the Democrats' virtual convention in August that should not be forgotten. An elite vision of the future of US politics was strikingly captured in a video featuring Biden Republican John Kasich, when he was shown standing at a fork in a road, looking ahead to where two formerly divergent roads have merged into one. As in 2016, both neoliberal and neoconservative elites consolidated around the Democratic ticket, while the only 'alternative' that the political establishment and its media permitted were the more 'nationalist' Republicans under Trump (though this time as the incumbent rather than the challenger). The typical appeals to the left presumed it to be unified in understanding this as a choice between 'corporatism' and 'fascism,' with the assumption that, with the former--if the left sacrificed building its independent strength once again, offering it up instead to the neolib-neocon establishment in order to help it unseat Trump--we'll at least have the chance to 'push them to the left' between elections, or even to have democratic elections again in the future, where at some point we will presumably be able to start voting for actual preferences, rather than for an ever-worsening lesser evil to forestall a greater evil. Yet such is a future (as is underscored by the imagery of the Kasich video, with only one road lying ahead) that the beneficiaries of this rationale are determined we never have.
While there are ample grounds for skepticism, in view of how the Democrats have run their own primaries as well as their regular efforts to suppress third-party challengers, whistleblowers, and independent journalists, to regard them as a means of 'saving' democracy from fascism or any other form of authoritarianism (to say nothing of the record of their anti-Trump Republican allies), the faultiness of this framing does not end there. The supposed clash is between forces which share a hostility towards democratic responsiveness to working-class interests. Fascism originally came about as a result of the ruling class' difficulties in containing working-class demands within the framework of bourgeois democracy. The same is true of the succession of policy and institutional changes that have been carried out during the long neoliberal backlash against working-class interests since roughly the 1970s. With these changes, it has proven not to be necessary to outright displace formal representative democracy with overt dictatorship, nor even to outlaw specific political parties. (Other ways, some already in use from decades prior--particularly relating to ballot and media access--have been available to raise barriers against the meaningful participation of any parties that otherwise might pose difficulties for ruling-class interests.)
Rather, a basic aim and method of this overall process has been to insulate legislators and government officials as much as possible from popular pressures, particularly in the areas of fundamental economic power, both domestically and internationally (i.e., military-economic imperialism in the latter case); and thus from any need to be responsive to working-class interests in order to maintain their hold on office. While success in thus insulating supposedly representative government from such pressures has often gone hand in hand with an ability to channel discontent into cultural issues, what has truly proved indispensable has been the habitual propagation of the lesser-evilist mentality on the left, which time and again puts the onus on voters to guarantee corporate candidates their votes regardless of their actual record and policy views, no matter how unrepresentative and unresponsive they get. In effect, through lesser-evilism, they are given permission to accommodate corporate interests as much as they feel they need to, provided their major-party opponent next time is someone their constituents again favor even less (since the very practice of mass lesser-evilism both results from and reinforces the barriers that keep the potential challenge of non-corporate third parties in check).
This time, Trump again proved useful to the establishment in driving a large, frightened portion of the public into its arms. His repeated message to his base, in the months leading up to the election, not to accept any result other than his re-election as legitimate appeared to threaten one basic principle of constitutional government that has managed to survive the long-term corporate take-over--namely that one's continuance in office is subject to an electoral process, the legitimacy of which is to be accepted unless one first has actual evidence showing otherwise; in the absence of such evidence, one must be ready and willing to alternate with other servants of concentrated power. (That's where the most noteworthy contrast is; in the matters of his use of Homeland Security and ICE, the hands of his supposed corporatist 'opposition' are hardly clean themselves.) Post-election, Trump's continued rejection of results widely broadcast as legitimate has thus continued to appear as an un-democratic, un-constitutional rejection of this principle per se. As such, it has been more worrisome to many than the seemingly constitution-affirming succession of defeats delivered to the chief executive by the courts (against his legal team's efforts to provide some basis for claims of the illegitimacy of the election results) has been reassuring.
Given such an incumbent, the left has had a much easier time overlooking the actual state that 'our democracy' had reached even without Trump: The consistent pro-corporate, pro-military-industrial complex, anti-worker policymaking, cheered on by corporate media, while truly independent news sources are subject to biased algorithms, when not being outright smeared as foreign assets (as in the Washington Post's 'Prop-or-Not' coverage in November 2016). More easily overlooked as well was the actual record of the Democrats to date as 'protectors' against the right--from 'peace candidate' of '64 LBJ's effectuating the massive escalation of the Vietnam War the following year; to the phasing out of detente and ushering in of deregulation in the Carter years, in advance of Reagan; to Clinton's passing of NAFTA and the Omnibus Crime Bill, his signing of welfare 'reform,' the Telecommunications Act, ending of Glass-Steagall and beginning of NATO expansion; to Obama's prioritizing the interests of banks over those of the victims of their lending practices, his suppression of Occupy Wall Street, his adoption of a pro-insurance industry Heritage Foundation health care 'reform,' and his preserving, protecting, defending, and extending Bush-era neocon policies of endless war and police state measures. (And this was even without as much of an expectation as in the case of Biden of their needing to be 'moved left' once we got them in.) But while we are being encouraged to pretend that the pre-Trump status quo provided adequate channels for countering the policies favored by concentrated wealth, and that moves toward eroding democracy from here on in could only be the result of the ambitions of a single authoritarian individual, the fact is in reality that anything Trump or anyone else would attempt would not succeed without the same kind of elite consensus which has accounted for the further shifts in favor of corporate dominance that we have endured to this point.
The question is, what role will the public have in shaping the context which those elites will have to reckon with? As expected, that context continues to be one in which much of the public signals that its dread of Republicans still surpasses its desire and determination for long-needed changes in terms of whose interests are served by our governing institutions, to the point that it continues to freely assent to the sham choices offered up by that system. (The message, this time as at others, has basically been, 'An opponent like this succeeded in getting us to vote for this other candidate regardless of his/her record, and will succeed in getting us to do so again the next time too!') It further signals that it has so internalized the learned helplessness inculcated through a long-running abusive relationship with the Democratic wing of the corporate war party, that it lacks the confidence in its own ability to resist independently of it, notwithstanding the actual results of such dependency to date. The Big Lie of lesser-evilism is the notion that the only effect of it that one need be concerned with is the positive one of helping to remove a presumed greater evil. The reality, though, is that, however that vote may be justified or rationalized, the forces represented by the recipient of that vote are necessarily strengthened, while those from whom it is arguably being withheld--non-corporate parties of the left (such as the Green Party and, in 2020, the presidential campaign of Howie Hawkins) that actually take the policy positions that such voters profess to support, while also advocating for electoral reforms that the corporate parties won't touch--are blocked from increasing in strength, or even weakened further for failure to meet corporate-party-imposed ballot-access requirements (which Governor Andrew Cuomo has already recently increased in New York, for example).
Worse still, when the context for political decision-making and action is thus reinforced, it carries over into the new term. Protestations to the contrary from left proponents of Biden during the recent campaign (such as those here) that, post-election, they will 'fight him' to 'move him left,' the track record of being able to pressure a party, and the forces that back it, while simultaneously exhibiting dependence on it, has not been great (think only of the Obama years). At that point, it is not so easy for such proponents to be taken seriously when arguing that the degree of policy difference between a Democratic administration and the Republicans is not sufficient, when only months earlier they had been arguing--and urging people to confirm with their votes--that it was in fact sufficient. If acknowledged at all, the response likely to be given in turn would be, in effect, 'The degree of difference was enough to secure your support last time without us actually having a record that accords well with your policy views--much the contrary--and it's likely it will be again next time.' Meanwhile, the urgency of removing Republicans at election time transitions to the need to keep them from getting back in, and with that, cautioning against being overly critical of the Democrats reassumes its preeminence. And again, all of this is in a context in which, thanks in large part to lesser-evilism, independent left parties have been prevented from growing, reinforcing the sense of dependency on the Democrats. The establishment will thus again have an easier time channeling discontent with the status quo in a rightward direction--which sets the stage for still more lesser-evilism from the persistently fear-driven left, as the cycle prepares to repeat itself yet again.
One wonders what might have been accomplished in the twenty years since the Florida fiasco in 2000 if the left intelligentsia and alternative media had invested comparable energy into joining with the Greens and other third parties in their support for fundamental electoral reforms to end the first-past-the-post system, as they have in imploring left voters every four years to be sure to vote for another corporate imperialist police-state politician with a 'D' next to their name (admittedly, the names of those imploring may change somewhat from one cycle to the next, albeit with some constancy as well). In this capacity, rather than as leaders of the left with an understanding of the historic function of the Democrats in reining in the demands of the working class, they instead appear more as functionaries of the change-averse professional-managerial class. They act as if their case is made by pointing out, 'you're not going to bring in the revolution by voting anyway, so....' --which sidesteps the point that votes for either corporate party do strengthen the forces of counter-revolution. Deceptively, perhaps lying to themselves, they make it sound as if what they're advocating electorally is basically a holding action, with Democrats acting as a shield against things getting worse, while movement activism then goes to work to get them to improve in the meantime. The anticipation of at least keeping things from getting worse is presumed to justify the withholding of votes once again from the Greens and other independent left parties, who wouldn't need to be pushed on the issues since they're already right there in their platform. But, far from things not getting worse, the result has been that--even when Democrats have controlled both the White House and Congress--the left and the interests of working people have sunk further and further into a neoliberal quicksand while trying to play on the realistic, 'pragmatic' terrain of the corporate interests.
The result of this pervasive and unchanging rationale has been that the left has kept feeding into a negative dialectic, wherein the worst, most regressive characteristics of two seemingly opposed forces are synthesized, which then--so long as it continues--will generate another pairing of ostensibly opposed negatives, pointing the way to another regressive synthesis, and so on, and so on (observe how comfortable the Democratic establishment is in embracing Straussian Bush-era neocons--the greater evil from whom they were supposed to have rescued us in 2008). The left keeps getting corralled into helping this process along by perceiving its interest to be in siding with one against the other--when the real urgency is to break out of the pattern, and to keep the negative dialectic from developing and refining itself, and our own collective behavior, even further. And we can't expect to just wait around until the beneficiaries of this process afford us a moment where it will be 'safe' for us to do so.
Still, there are those who will say, 'But aren't there times when it just seems necessary to vote lesser-evil? To look past who/what it is you're voting for and use it strictly as a means to help defeat someone you want removed?' I've certainly known the feeling and have even voted on that basis before myself. But given how pervasive and constant this approach to voting has been on the left over such a long time, and how contrary to its professed justifications the results for our politics have been (and, as I anticipate, are likely to be in the case of the Biden-Harris administration), serious reexamination is in order (the moreso in view of the calumnies--'selfish!,' 'privileged!'--often hurled, reflexively and unreflectively, at those who decline to adhere to it). This means having greater clarity on the actual nature of the relationship between the ostensible lesser and greater evils, in this case between the majority of the political establishment and the Trumpian right (is it really comparable to that between the Allies and the Axis, as Cornel West analogized in an interview a few months back?; especially when you consider how frequently Trump was criticized for not being hawkish enough on foreign policy?); as well as the role lesser-evilism has played in enabling that establishment to steer our politics to where they are today, making it ever easier for both major parties to defy the public's policy preferences and pander to corporate and imperial interests. Rather than something that will help 'buy us some time' so that we'll have a chance to build strength and advance later--a justification often invoked, regardless of what the actual results have been to date--lesser-evilism has instead shown itself (as I've written about previously) to be analogous to 'subtraction stew,' from the children's novel 'The Phantom Tollbooth': A food with the peculiar quality that, the more you eat of it, the hungrier you get; so that you never reach the point the eventual attainment of which was the justification for the action--more than that, the repeated action--in question.
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